In this post I will explain how to handle cases of planned downtime. That is, a short period of time wherein you purposely make your website inaccessible. This can be due to significant changes to the site or because of server maintenance.

@Info4u2use: I'm not sure I follow you. All I'm saying is that the small decline in representation of EMDs in the top rankings could be due to EMDs tend to be owned by people who practice spammy techniques which Google has caught up with recently.

I found several sites during the holiday that were taken down due to maintenance and all of them were handled incorrectly. Apparently there wasn't any guide to this here on SEOmoz, and I think it is a rather important topic - so here the guide is :)

Google is clearly trying to take over as much of the SERPs as possible* - this would not be a suprising move at all. It would make it possible to show even more information on the SERP of name searches.

Google's market share combined with the ability to heavily integrate Google+ with SERPs and all their services is the main reason I believe Google+ will succeed.

You are right, a Google+ profile is only this "impressive" when shown in the Google SERPs. I'm aware of the fact that Bing has a fair market share in US, but in Denmark where most of my clients are based, Google has a market share of 97%(!). Bing is not even in the picture here :)

You often see people on forums and blogs claiming that they "discovered" something about Google's algorithm in one of their "experiments".

Unfurtunately many people dont understand the fact that correlation does not imply causation. And in addition to that, they think you can conclude something from even the smallet datasets.

This is why i like SEOmoz - Here you can find the scientific methods used, which other blogs often ignore, and even delivered in a language or with beautiful infographics that most people will understand.

Moral, ethics and SEO is an endless debate that tends to spark many emotions. You can either hate and ignore the tecniques that many people categorize as blackhat/spammy/low quality, or you can accept the fact that they exist and often works (well).

I recently gave my oppinion on this in a response to Rands video on article marketing:

I was doing research for a post on analytics data yesterday and I made that exact graph with Google Trends (twitter, facebook, myspace). It shows perfectly how certain keywords may have a limited timeframe. I also looked at the graph for "tv" and "swimmingpool" and how they peak during december and summer respectively to illustrate how most statics aren't accurate within year one.

Yes I agree, and thats also the cool thing about SEOmoz, that you and the rest of the SEOmoz team have an oppinion and participate in the following discussion to each post.

After reading the transcription or seing the video I think people are led to believe that the three aforementioned techniques should never be used. I'm just saying they can work, especially if used in combination with the more "high quality" techniques.

But as we both mention, this is not for everyone because you need to know what you are doing and the risk associated with it.

There is apparently a lot of emotions and oppinions in play, when we discuss the ethical aspect of SEO.

We live in 2011, and therefore we have to look at how the search engines behave and react right now. Article marketing, do-follow commenting and directory submission work - wether we like it or not. It may not always do, but it does right now. You can close your eyes and wait until Google makes a change that stops this, but your "opponents" may outrank you untill then. And what if this change is happening 2 years from now?

Remember though, these techniques are just one side of SEO, and you should always do a risk assesment when you consider using them (this applies to everything related to SEO though).

To be honest I don't like the preaching style of this video. I like SEOmoz for the insigths in how SEO works, and I feel like this video is too biased.

I understand SEOmoz has a brand to protect, but I hope this doesnt mean you shouldn't expect completely unbiased knowledge from SEOmoz in the future.

Adding illustrations to a article not only makes it more fun and interesting to read - it also makes me more likely to link to or share the article. I guess this applies to most people. I know i'm bookmarking articles with great illustrations often.

Social media will be filled with as much spam as the SERPs. Just take a look at some of the bookmarksites providing do-follow links to the source.

It's true that it will be difficult to get 100 likes/thumbs up/+1 by yourself, but 99% of the stuff people will be searching for may not have any likes yet. And then it's not better than searching Google for it.

It's also a matter of habit. People are using Google because the know it works most of the time and its quick. I doubt the average searcher would think: "hey, i can go search facebook for this!"

All this may change in the distant future, but i dont think it is gonna be anytime soon.

This is a great example. People need to realize the fact that there is more to gain from a link than linkjuice. Think about the related trafic a link might bring.

"Oh, you know, I have this great opportunity. It looks like a great page. It is sitting at CNN.com/articles/012345, but it has a PageRank of 0 or 1. I don't really know if I want that link." Oh my God! You want that link! It's on CNN! What? Come on!

In the end, all the SEO efforts are likely meant to increase revenue. Even though a link has lower pagerank it might end up providing a lot more real value